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Back to scrawled notes and secret whispers?

For a political journalist the acceptance of an honour is a sort of professional vasectomy: only a tweak, but in a tiny yet indicative way you are not entirely the man you were. You carry on doing whatever you did before but it will never quite mean the same again. You have taken the shilling. A small, key subversive gland has been neutralised.

Not least then among the many good reasons for retaining honours is the system’s usefulness as a searchlight. It’s interesting to illuminate those of our enfants terribles who have, after all, craved Establishment status; and the best way to find out is to offer it to them. Philip Larkin’s disdain for the OBE turns out to have arisen not from his rage…